Aampe raises $1.8 Mln funding from Sequoia Capital's scale-up program Surge

In an era of fast-changing customer needs and the desire for more curated experiences, personalised messaging software startup Aampe has announced US$1.8 million in funding to help businesses innovate and optimise how they communicate with customers. The investment is led by Sequoia Capital India’s Surge, a rapid scale-up program for startups in Southeast Asia and India. 

Founded in July 2020, Aampe uses machine learning to personalise messages and communication for customers, helping businesses drive better customer retention and growth. 

The increased adoption of new digital channels by consumers amidst the COVID-19 pandemic has not only given businesses access to rich insights but has also opened new opportunities to build more customised experiences for an enhanced customer experience.  As the future of customer engagement is continuous and personalised – focusing on an ongoing conversation rather than a series of bulk “blasts” – Aampe allows communication to adapt and keep up with fast-changing consumer behaviour. Aampe’s product dynamically tailors message content, timing, and channels based on experimentally generated customer insights. The result is incrementally personalised customer conversations over time. 

For product managers who have keen intuition about their customers and brilliant product instincts but struggle operationally to get past manually driven A/B testing, Aampe can help to unlock the power of data and continuous experimentation in order to deliver business value.

Aiming for seamless integration, Aampe’s APIs and reinforcement learning pipelines and models can be easily plugged into messaging and communication providers that companies already use. This allows product managers, data scientists, and growth marketers to avoid expensive and time-intensive engineering projects.  

Aampe uses historical data to guide initial timing experiments for communication, helping to personalise when users are most responsive. It also prioritises customers’ message copy to track granular elements of push notifications, SMS, and email. For example, Aampe can decipher whether ‘Priyanka’ is more likely to engage on a weeknight with a message containing an offer, social proof, or a recommendation. Then, it personalises messages to Priyanka with the hooks that will most appeal to her.

“As a data scientist, I’ve struggled repeatedly across multiple companies with the quality of tools for user messaging. Naive automation has been prioritised over reliable inference and quality data generation. We’re building Aampe to make first-class data science serve one of the most important responsibilities of any business: speaking and listening to customers,” said Paul Meinshausen, Co-Founder of Aampe.

“Most companies believe they’re sitting on massive stores of incredibly valuable data. While this is true to some extent, the usefulness of data also degrades quickly - and many companies underestimate the importance of continuously generating new and high-quality data. Aampe’s APIs do this and feed that data back into product development at both strategic and tactical levels,” he added.

While still at an early stage, Aampe has acquired key customers across multiple countries in Asia, including India, Singapore, Myanmar, and Indonesia. The funding from Sequoia Capital India’s Surge will further accelerate Aampe’s growth momentum and product development to serve global customers. 

Aampe is co-founded by Paul Meinshausen, who previously co-founded the fintech company PaySense, which was acquired by PayU in 2019; Sami Abboud, a software developer and data scientist who earned his PhD in Neuroscience from the Sorbonne in Paris; and Schaun Wheeler, an experienced data science leader who co-developed an award-winning Consumer Graph product at top US marketing and adtech company, Valassis. Along with other members of the startup’s broader founding team, they have worked together across ten years and multiple companies. Customers can sign up for Aampe by emailing get@aampe.com.